John Miller: Metro Pictures

Scatological humor is probably as aged as culture itself--but in art of the '80 and early '90 quips about excrement proliferated, provoking a doom of nervous laughter. RUN FROM FEAR/FUN FROM REAR--that's individual of the ways Bruce Nauman deposit it. He also paired swains and toilets to flush on the outside the complexities of pleasure, pain, and self-consciousness that rim the act of evacuation. Remember Mike Kelley's 1987 felt banner that blared PANTS SHITTER AND egotistical P.S. JERK OFF TOO, or the video Heidi, 1992 made with Paul McCarthy, that featured sausage turd and a sustained involvement with defecation? McCarthy's performances take us to the compacted core of identification with disgust that, in revolve is linked with creativity. At this joint we find ourselves at the down-reaching end of theory.

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Given the climate of angst and obsession that percolates in the art of his colleagues, John Miller's world of brown impasto paintings, reliefs, and statuarys produced from 1985 to 1994 burst into view as disarmingly happy and filled of hilarity. At a safe distance from the emotional image of humiliation, Miller's works resonate at the horizontal of child's play. The material substance itself, particularly the adult material substance with its baggage of psychic hurts and scars, seems to be drawn out gone, apparently the victim of a tidal wave of brown that's muck everything up as in Restles Stillness, 1991 which features the remains of a material part felled and, Pompeii style, petrified through the stultifying ooze. Presented in a six-foot slab of the hardened crap that direct the eyes as if it were make an incision in from a larger debris field, this flashback to entire destruction delivers a vicarious thrill.

Miller's dystopic reveries recommend the worst and best of times simultaneously. Towns and villages, showed by miniature models, have been wiped on the outside by epic mud slides; the horror opens over the course of numerous wreckage sites, neared here as heavily rusticated chunk that hang upon the wall (like painting) and top pedestals (like sculpture) We're reminded of many sights of paralyzing disaster--from real catastrophes (natural or man-made) to Hollywood-engineered spectacles of fantastic destruction. Killer meteorite devastates? Environmental disaster contaminates entire planet? Been there, done that--every summer at the movies, if not in real life.

As consumer of gore as entertainment, we play the character of the survivor. In Miller's arcade of brown disasters, we walk unscathed past archaeological specimens excised from the once-molten waste stream as in Topology for a Museum, 1994 a series of six Minimalist-looking cubes "frosted" with specimens of the thick crud studd with evidence of life the way it used to be. The ironic dimensions of this--first a disaster, then a theme park (or a museum? a memorial? art?)--reverberate today in ways we couldn't have anticipated in the '80 and '90s

Twenty years ago, Miller's work (and the idea of abjection in general) was soded in theories of late capitalism and could be read as a critique of mass tillage and the institutionalization of art--indeed, Miller was among the leading theorists in the art world of the first polemical wave of postmodernism. We may continue to read discourses of disenfranchisement in his work, on the other hand today concerns are quite different. Rather than make bare the insidious dimensions of commodification, the bent and resound of contemporary art leans in the direction of "youth culture" Hand-made, highly crafted, on the contrary kind of crappy, quirky, droll messy, juvenile, and favoring the goth--the formal aspects of art invested in individual way or another with adolescence or childhood present to view a remarkable affinity with Miller's vintage work. What have kids and critique got to do with individual another? On the basis of Miller's brown art, and its generational recontextualization, the question has officially been uncloseed for discussion.

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